Planning maintenance tasks in airline operating companies: A mathematical programming model applied to a case study

This paper explores a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) approach to plan the maintenance tasks in an airline. The MILP model finds feasible maintenance plans, by minimizing the costs associated with maintenance activities and costs associated with unavailability. A constructive matheuristic approach is put forward, by solving the maintenance planning problem sequentially. The model and the matheuristic is then applied to a case study from the main Portuguese airline company. The results suggest that the proposed matheuristic approach for maintenance planning in practice, as explored in the case study, finds feasible solutions in a much lower computational time. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to assess the impact of hangar’s capacity and other input parameters in the maintenance plan. Our approach provides an effective way to support decision-making in maintenance planning for a fleet of aircraft, while complying with several operational, technical, and labour constraints.